CT synthesis from MR images using frequency attention conditional generative adversarial network

Abstract

Magnetic resonance (MR) image-guided radiotherapy is widely used in the treatment planning of malignant tumors, and MR-only radiotherapy, a representative of this technique, requires synthetic computed tomography (sCT) images for effective radiotherapy planning. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown remarkable performance in generating sCT images. However, CNN-based models tend to synthesize more low-frequency components and the pixel-wise loss function usually used to optimize the model can result in blurred images. To address these problems, a frequency attention conditional generative adversarial network (FACGAN) is proposed in this paper. Specifically, a frequency cycle generative model (FCGM) is designed to enhance the inter-mapping between MR and CT and extract more rich tissue structure information. Additionally, a residual frequency channel attention (RFCA) module is proposed and incorporated into the generator to enhance its ability in perceiving the high-frequency image features. Finally, high-frequency loss (HFL) and cycle consistency high-frequency loss (CHFL) are added to the objective function to optimize the model training. The effectiveness of the proposed model is validated on pelvic and brain datasets and compared with state-of-the-art deep learning models. The results show that FACGAN produces higher-quality sCT images while retaining clearer and richer high-frequency texture information.

Keywords: Attention mechanism; Deep learning; Generative adversarial networks; MR; Synthetic CT.